Gauge freedom and efficient algorithms for Lindbladian learning

Abstract

We study the problem of learning a local Lindbladian in the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) noise. Although recent work has developed scalable learning algorithms under idealized access assumptions, SPAM can make distinct Lindbladians experimentally indistinguishable, thus making part of the Lindbladian fundamentally unlearnable. We give a sharp characterization of this obstruction for bounded-degree local Lindbladians. We identify a family of locality-preserving gauge transformations that commutes with trusted single-qubit control, and use it to classify Lindbladian components. For the generically gauge dependent components, we construct Lindbladians to show that they can have $Ω(1)$ uncertainty independent of system size, even after imposing complete positivity. We complement this characterization with SPAM-robust algorithms for learning every universally gauge-invariant component. Our algorithms use only trusted single-qubit operations, require neither ancillas nor entangling control, and use $\widetilde{\mathcal O}\left(ε^{-2}\log(N/δ)\right)$ experiments and total evolution time for constant locality and degree. Our guarantees allow global SPAM to become arbitrarily far from ideal as $N$ grows, requiring only nonvanishing local visibility. We also establish sufficient conditions for boundary-induced gauge invariance of additional Hamiltonian coefficients under physical positivity constraints, though learning these additional parameters in general remains an open problem. More broadly, our gauge-aware framework and SPAM-cancellation techniques offer a practical toolkit for the scalable characterization of open quantum systems.